The sun finally broke through late afternoon on Day Four of SXSW, and it was beautiful!
We’ve arrived at an interesting impasse where our climate of #AltFacts has coincided with an overwhelming flood of information leaving us in a serious information crisis. What information is reliable? What is true? What is authentic and what is genuinely false? SXSW Interactive 2017 presented a number of keynotes and sessions dedicated to the power of story to draw us into a space where we experience something quite different than cultural confusion in the intersection of our shared humanity.
Beyond the veneer of the factual there is in every person and in every situation a story. If you ask me who I am, I will certainly provide some facts that characterize me – born in Texas, raised in California, educated at Pepperdine and Baylor, married to Chantal – but as I relate these statements of fact I will weave them into a narrative. Narrative engages our humanity in a way that draw us in. And a good story, one where genuine authenticity is encountered, goes beyond being informative to being transformative.
Several panels I attended on Day Four explored the vital importance of story. The first panel discussion, featuring Funny or Die head writer and former Obama speechwriter David Litt, mined the power of story to arrive at a place of empathy. Empathy, the panelists suggested, is the goal and aim of any good story. As the story unfolds, whether personal or situational, the speaker and the engaged listener journey through language, stripping away mere fact, sailing on the waves of deeply intentioned rhetoric, to arrive at an interpersonal encounter where the boundary between Self and Other collapses. The experience of a story well told brings hearer and listener face to face, standing on the ground of empathy, or authentic mutual understanding. This powerful moment that melds us to one another through a deep understanding of our common humanity is critical for overcoming the myriad social, cultural, psychic and physical walls that separate us. Once we find ourselves in this place of knowing and being known, we experience how story grounds and enlarges us so that the powerful narrative becomes part of our story. This is the transformative power of story that is essential to human thriving in the world, most importantly, but also key to connecting with key audiences in the framework of marketing and communication. If a brand message or even public address, can bring people along with you on the journey to the point of empathy, that connection has both attractive and transformative power.
My second panel on Day Four extended this conversation about story into the world of online video. One of the new metrics that was mentioned in many SXSW sessions is that the human attention span is now on average shorter than that of a goldfish: 8 seconds. And some in marketing believe this is a generous estimate. Yet, when a compelling narrative is captured in a long form online video people not only watch it all the way through, sometimes for up to 2 to 3 minutes (or more), but they also share it with their peers who are then more likely to view it in its entirety. As with spoken narrative, there is something about a visual story that draws us to a point of humanizing empathy for another or an immediately personal experience of ourselves that compels. From the perspective of marketing, if you produce a video that functions to create this story of connection with your viewers, it is a breakthrough to the possibility of not only brand identity, but brand loyalty. So, the panel of video marketers from Reckitt Benckiser, Cox Cable and Sapient Razorfish, surmised that attention is not the biggest issue when it comes to marketing and advertising, it is the quality of the content. Someone who binges hours of shows on Netflix will certainly invest 2 minutes to view a great piece of video content online. If that high quality video happens to in support of a brand or cause, the investment in producing the powerful video will be worthwhile.
The third Day Four session featured a panel of speakers from National Geographic – Photographer Aaron Huey, Deputy Director of Photography and Digital Patrick Witty and Vice President of Social Media. Given who they were, they unsurprisingly affirmed the power of visual storytelling, in this case, using the tools in Instagram and SnapChat. National Geographic allows its photographers on assignment to access the Instagram account for the brand and post from around the globe. Through the images, videos and now live streams shared on the feed, their photographers bring stories of diverse peoples and geographies to the feed in real time to their over 72 million followers. The National Geographic of the past sent photographers on explorational assignments for days, weeks or months. When the expedition was over the pictures were processed and then would make it into the magazine along with a compelling companion narrative weeks or months later. The magazine still requires this sort of timeline to produce the in-depth, high-quality stories characteristic of National Geographic, but leveraging Instagram and SnapChat creates a real-time immersive experience for their audience. The impact, however, is more than just a matter of sequential images. Using video or the format of a photo essay, these embedded photographers on assignment narrate the story of the people and places where they find themselves. One of the photographers showed his repeated visits to Salvation Mountain near the Salton Sea in California. The images taken by him and his son didn’t simply depict, they narrated the story of the people who live in this interesting desert community. The immediacy and the art of the explorers that comes through the images constructs powerful narratives of these far flung peoples and places, demonstrating the power of visual storytelling for creating connection and empathy for others.
Finally, a surprising session on Day Five rounds out this theme of story. Entitled “15,000-Year-Old Marketing Strategy: Why It Works,” the session surprisingly featured Donny Osmond….Junior. The son of the perennial entertainer owns OzComm marketing and landed a panel at SXSW. Osmond brought his father onto the panel along with neurobiologist Shonte Taylor and the CMO Lead for Worldwide Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft, Jeff Marcoux. Their conversation explored the power of story as a resource for engagement in marketing and entertainment. In the course of the conversation, Donny Osmond, Sr., shared how he leveraged story over the years to take his fan base on a journey with him through several phases of his career. In another example, Osmond shared how employs the different canons of storytelling to connect with his audience through memory, personal connection and verbal imagery. Taylor explained the power of narrative through our biology, making the chemical case for our emotional states tied to the dynamics of story. Stories, the panel affirmed, were the language of ancient peoples and so the fact that story continues to connect us is immediately intuitive and will always remain both relevant and important.
In these sessions and as part of other sessions during SXSW Interactive, embracing the power of story was in the air. But these conversations were not simply about technique. At their core, these presentations and conversations sought narrative as a pathway to finding human empathy in a world where the prime motive seems to be the opposite. Through story – whether verbal or visual – we quickly discover our deep human connections with one another. Story bridges to form these connections and to bring us to mutual understanding in a way that affirms our common humanity. By telling our story authentically and well, and helping others to tell theirs, we encounter the power to transform and be transformed.